10 Biggest Gadget Design Fails

Easily Muffled Speakers

Nothing can spoil your listening pleasure more than poorly placed speakers. On notebooks, this often means bottom-mounted speakers that can easily be muffled when sitting in your lap. (It’s as if their makers forgot about the “lap” part of laptop.) The otherwise excellent ASUS N550JV and Acer Aspire S7 both exhibit this flaw. On the tablet front, the Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 has speakers along the bottom edge, which makes it all too easy to cover them up when holding the device in landscape mode. Same thing goes for the iPhone 5c and 5s.

The solution is to try to place the speakers in a position that directs sound at the users, as the HTC One does with its dual front-facing speakers. Apple and others do a good job on the notebook front by putting the speakers behind the keyboard.

Responsible for the editorial vision for Laptop Mag and Tom's Guide, Mark Spoonauer has been Editor in Chief of LAPTOP since 2003 and has covered technology for nearly 15 years. Mark speaks at key tech industry events and makes regular media appearances on CNBC, Fox and CNN. Mark was previously reviews editor at Mobile Computing, and his work has appeared in Wired, Popular Science and Inc.